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Richard Rothstein’s book, The Color of Law, recounts—among many other examples—the successful re-segregation efforts that took place in the city of Helena, Montana. It is but one of a great many other instances the book uses to describe how, during the 20th century, local and federal government enacted policies specifically intended to place black and white people in isolation from one another. The detrimental consequences of these efforts with respect to Native Blacks in this country cannot be overstated. They unquestionably constitute an essential component of the now yawning racial wealth gap, as whites—who previously lived in mixed communities but were afforded access to homes via FHA loans that were denied to African-Americans—clustered together in the suburbs. As black communities were left to languish in the wake of this re-segregation, The Color of Law shows how the present ills of urban black America—contrary to the claim of a pathologized blackness—are a direct, functional disorder of the racist handiwork of the real estate industry, state courts and the federal government.

What becomes apparent when looking at Helena—while never exactly being a very dense African-American city—was how the black community that was there had in fact prospered in a milieu of integration. There was an “established middle-class,” Rothstein writes, an African-American police officer patrolled one of the town’s wealthiest white neighborhoods, and there were “black newspapers, black-owned businesses and a black literary society.” However, as anti-black attitudes began metastasizing throughout the country, whatever harmony and stability had existed was soon shattered as African-Americans started being “systematically expelled” from Helena and other predominantly white communities. Between 1910 and 1970, the city’s black population declined by 90 per cent as a result of white mobs terrorizing the black community—abetted by local law enforcement—and anti-miscegenation laws.

To look at Helena today, one observes what seems to be a town that has—despite its unconscionable history—made progress in its stance on anti-blackness. After all, this past year, the city of Helena elected Wilmot Collins as its first black mayor. Collins is a 54 year-old refugee from Liberia who came to the United States at the age of 31, and is someone who, we are told, has “the most American of stories.” Presumably—for someone who is unaware of the specifics of Collins’ story—this language is meant to indicate and emphasize his embodiment of the idealized refugee experience; his ascendancy from the archetypal destitute arrival to his eventual attainment of the highest-ranking position in a municipal government. However, as with the preponderance of those “most American of stories,” a closer look at Collins’ actual experience shows how describing it in these terms conceals more than it reveals. Moreover, to conceive of Collins’ election as constituting some kind of meaningful leap forward for race relations in Helena, Montana is to misunderstand the utterly devastating legacy of the coordinated assault on black life that The Color of Law describes having taken place in the town, and on black America more generally. Those deliberate actions of re-segregation guaranteed the kind of instability that precludes any community-based, agenda-driven politics, and which could only ever allow for a future scenario in which a black candidate who “never felt that his race was a factor” might win the mayoral race.

It seems there could not be a more perfect expression and realization of the government project to keep Native Blacks at the bottom of society than to systematically engineer their place there and then have as mayor a feel-good symbol of blackness, and America’s enterprising spirit, say that his win was “not about race or anything.” Certainly, by now we must understand such a familiar proclamation as code for—and reassurance that—his tenure as Mayor will, too, not be “about race or anything.” However, a bit of digging on the Internet reveals just how powerfully race has in fact operated in Collins’ own “most American of stories.”

In 1984, Collins’ wife, Maddie, had been a Liberian high school cultural exchange student living in Helena. Her host family was a white family named the Nachsteims—Bruce and Nancy—a couple who would prove absolutely integral to both her and Wilmot’s futures. In 1988, Maddie graduated from Helena High School and returned to Liberia, which was then mired in a civil war. After fleeing the violence to Ghana with Wilmot, Maddie placed a telephone call from a shelter there to the Nachsteims and explained to them her situation. The Nachsteims quickly strategized a plan to get Maddie back to Helena. “The only way we could get [Maddie] into the U.S., was if she applied for a student visa,” Joyce Nachtsheim said. “So we explained to Carrol College what the plight was, and the college said, `We will pay for it, don’t you worry.’ It helped us tremendously, and so Maddie came on a student visa.” Maddie received a full scholarship to Carroll College, where she would study nursing.

Maddie arrived pregnant in Montana in 1992. Wilmot had to remain in Ghana. Immediately, the Nachsteims set about trying to reunite her with her husband as expeditiously as possible. Bruce Nachsteim—who was a former FBI agent—contacted state Senator Conrad Burns and Senator Baucus, along with Congressman Pat Williams to initiate the process that would eventually bring Maddie’s husband over to Helena. “I talked to everyone who was anyone,” he said. In the interim, Maddie gave birth to a daughter in a hospital that, according to Nachsteim, “didn’t charge her anything…everyone pitched in to help this African girl from a war-torn county whom they had no connection with. It was really very spectacular.”

Throughout, Nachsteim continued “trying tirelessly” to get Wilmot to the United States, and in 1994 Wilmot finally secured a visa to come to Montana. Here’s a description of his arrival in Helena from a Public International Radio article:

“When [Wilmot] first arrived to Montana in 1994, the community had already rallied around his wife, who arrived more than two years earlier. He got off the plane to find a welcoming party put together by students at Helena High School and members of The First Lutheran Church. They held sheets of paper that together spelled out ‘Welcome home Wilmot.'”

As much as the media would like to wrap Collins’ story in the mythos of American opportunity that we’re repeatedly told is available to the very least of us, a scenario like this is inarguably atypical of the experience of an average refugee. And insofar as we take Collins’ story to be emblematic of a certain notion of opportunity and improbable success which is only accessible here in America, it’s important—it’s essential—to note how Collins’ success is one that is predicated on, and made completely possible by, proximity to whiteness. Without the Nachsteims, there is no Mayor Collins.

This imperative to be afforded the opportunities occasioned by proximity to whiteness is what the Breaking Brown project has repeatedly stated is one of the absolutely critical ways that the United States government can begin providing adequate redress for the economic devastation that has defined black life in America since the arrival of the first African slaves in the 17th century, and which is catalogued at length and in vivid detail in the pages of The Color of Law.

Indeed, the very fact of Mayor Collins’ election in Helena takes on a particular valence in light of Rothstein’s account of how the city was able to all but completely vanquish its black community in the mid 20th century. In many ways, Mayor Collins—who is already using his platform to extol the virtues of refugees and other immigrants—represents a new point in the continuum of black disadvantage that was being established during re-segregation. Breaking Brown has demonstrated at length the detrimental effects of the non-U.S. citizen labor stream on black workers (and U.S. labor more generally), and the need to prioritize jobs and protections for American workers and to shore up the wage floor. And so what does it mean to have a black Democratic mayor now advocating for the replacement to native blacks? Not just in the labor market, but also as potential affirmative action slots in higher education, and the many other ways in which the ushering in of new diversity functions to assist the United States in continuing to mask the predetermined, inevitable failure of African-American Descendants of Slaves—and by extension, the United States’ failure to heal the wound that it inflicted centuries ago and then proceeded to keep open? What does it mean to understand the sort of race-neutral politics of Mayor Collins as that which filled the vacuum left in the expulsion of Helena’s native black community? What , we have to wonder, in those intervening years could have been different—in Helena and elsewhere—if the government hadn’t ordained and done everything possible to keep Native Blacks at the very bottom of the social order?

The petite empire of Dr. Boyce Watkins is presently experiencing a bit of a legitimacy crisis.

This past week, a 2017 video surfaced in which Charles Wu—precisely the sort of execrable creature you’d expect to find writhing and wriggling around in the wet soil when you lift up the stone of the Marketing Copy world—could be seen videoconferencing with a colleague and congratulating himself on having stumbled upon what’s probably the most basic and elemental principle of marketing: emotion sells products.

In recounting his experience trying to develop a marketing concept for Dr. Boyce Watkins’ line of financial literacy products geared toward producing black wealth, Wu appears at an utter loss to be able to describe the actual products themselves as anything other than painfully ordinary, uninspiring, and offering effectively nothing beyond what is already available in the market. On the other hand, Wu becomes absolutely gleeful—literally giggling at one point in the video—talking about the moment he realized how, despite the products’ innate shortcomings, there exists a rich source that can be tapped into to reliably drive sales. That source is Black desperation.

“This was exciting for me as a copywriter,” he says, describing what must be the obvious thrill of realizing for oneself the long and profitable tradition of “selling hope,” as he puts it, to African-Americans. “We basically sell [Boyce’s products] as religion,” Wu continues, and in doing so, he not so subtly implies that the target consumer here is one whose exceptional and very real condition of economic desperation must be understood as highly favorable to exploitation. And that insofar as he can effectively use Boyce Watkins—and get his products to represent a particular idea of salvation—then they both stand to be the beneficiaries of that very desperation.

Despite his evident giddiness at the strategy, there is absolutely nothing less innovative than what Wu here describes. And to be honest, since Wu has opted to make a living writing marketing copy, it’s pretty unreasonable to expect him to have anything other than the most patently empty, predatory, and foul conception of human beings as things that exist only to sell stuff to. “They buy [Boyce’s products] just to feel good,” Wu says smugly, in a self-satisfied tone that reveals not only how enamored and impressed he is with his supposed savviness and mastery of the African-American “market,” but also the total disdain he possesses for the very people who comprise that “market.”

None of this should register as a shock. What should, and rightly has, excited loathing and disgust among a lot of people is how that attitude of basic contempt for black America has been easily and nefariously packaged in a very pro-black, public-facing component: a readymade, African-American financial ‘guru’ who goes out into the community and tries to sell them on the idea that by investing in his products, it will lead to a financially-secure and thus liberated future for themselves and their children.

This idea of black advancement—of black liberation without an attendant political component that can provide a sound foundation for even the possibility of meaningful black economic empowerment to occur—is one that is the very antithesis of what Yvette Carnell is advocating as a way forward for the African-American community in her work over at Breaking Brown.

In the aftermath of the video, Yvette Carnell has pointed out how the business relationship between Charles Wu and Boyce Watkins is in effect little more than the two having entered into an agreement to prey upon the extremely desperate situation of black America. She has rightly raised the critical question of how the African-American community should regard someone who publicly promotes an individualistic course of black self-determination, but whose private business dealings nonetheless involve, and depend on, a multicultural cast of capitalists whose very presence appear to give lie to Watkins’ notion of black self-determination. What does it mean, Breaking Brown asks, to give what little money exists in the black community over to a businessman whose own consulting firm sees him as being merely a cipher of black hope? Boyce is just a “character,” Wu says, a “pitch guy…my info-product guy.”

This juxtaposition of ideas—one that tirelessly pursues the claim of economic justice for the entire African-American community, and the other that explicitly rejects any such claim and encourages those people who are overwhelmingly the biggest victims of the economy (and thus the least equipped to endure its shocks and trappings) to try and build wealth for themselves in it anyway—is in many ways the central ideological choice facing black America today in their continued struggle for equality.

The deficiency of the latter choice should be obvious enough, as Breaking Brown has exposed the major contradiction of white capital being at the controls of an ostensibly black capitalist enterprise, and how this arrangement ultimately serves the interests of business by manipulating the emotional fragility that exists in the African-American community. Moreover, that fragility must be seen and understood as existing as a result of precisely the absence of the sort of large-scale, agenda-driven political activism that Boyce Watkins would have his community believe is an unnecessary corollary to obtaining financial security. In fact, as Yvette Carnell has been consistently educating her audience through the Breaking Brown project, collective politics is not so much a corollary as it is the very precondition for meaningful black economic advancement. And that the hidden costs of the community becoming or remaining depoliticized—seduced by the illusion of financial stability without having to do the very difficult but essential work of politically organizing around a black, reparative agenda—ensures their being targeted by opportunists and their willing utility in perpetuating their disadvantage.

It didn’t take too long for a Leftist to object to the share of attention being given the black voters of Alabama who last week swung the election in favor of the Democrats. In his article, “The Doug Jones Victory Belongs to the People of Alabama, Not Just African-Americans,” Benjamin Studebaker asks, “How do we think we make the 30% of white Alabamans who did vote for the Democrat feel when we give all the credit for the Jones victory to African-Americans?” I don’t know? Maybe we make them feel that as a group they were significantly less responsible for neutralizing a fucking theocrat who at the time of the election had an octet of women accusing him of sexual assault and child molestation? Because that’s just what the white Democratic vote was in this case. It’s an observed, numerical fact. And insofar as media coverage has attributed Moore’s defeat largely to African-Americans, it’s just reflecting and expressing that general truth. The white democrats’ role in this particular special election was a helpful but empirically small accessory to the much larger black democratic vote. And if this faction of the Left that Ben represents involves becoming nervous and uneasy about white people maybe getting a bit bristly when that reality is pointed out—or if the suggestion here is that we be good little Leftists and observe the political orthodoxy that instructs us on how the only way our side can be electorally competitive again is if we omit any mention about the many ways in which African-Americans deserve particular attention, then I say that the coalition is fraudulent and disingenuous. If we can’t even rightly credit black people for the basic fucking miraculousness of what they were able to accomplish last week in Alabama—particularly in spite of all the barriers that state has put in place precisely to render the black vote inconsequential—without getting all squeamish and worked up over how that mere acknowledgement might chaff at whites’ egos, then the Left shouldn’t be surprised when black people take a pessimistic view of the political project and assume that other interests precede and rank theirs.

Because that’s what people like Benjamin Studebaker are in fact saying when they shush other people for talking about black people: that the coalition only holds together insofar as that particular history of African-Americans, and its legacy, is suppressed or understood as necessarily ancillary to the allegedly uniform condition of suffering among poor people in the U.S. That condition, though, is not uniform; and there’s plenty of information out there to dispute the idea that it is or ever was. To take Alabama alone, Lowndes County—which recently made international news for the area’s hookworm epidemic—has a 4.1% white poverty rate compared to the black poverty rate of 34.5%. In Perry County, the white poverty rate is 8.1%; the black poverty rate, 32.7%. Wilcox County is the poorest county in the state, and the county with the starkest difference of poverty rates among whites and blacks, which stands at 8.8% and 50.2%, respectively. Similar numbers are found in Alabama’s Marengo County (5.6% for whites and 40.8% for the county’s black residents). And lastly, Winston County, which has the state’s highest white poverty rate (23%), is still almost three times less than the county’s black poverty rate (63.2%).

All of which is to underscore just how obtuse a statement is like the one Studebaker makes in the article when he writes that Alabama is poorer “not just because of [the] large African-American population [but] because even its white people are poorer.” And while that’s obviously true, the fact that a supposedly committed egalitarian can regard the markedly pronounced levels of black poverty as being of a kind with the state’s white poverty should signal a crude and deliberate attempt to completely minimize the particular justice claim that African-Americans have in this country.

You can’t look at Alabama as just poor. The quality of that poverty is brutally different with respect to black poverty, and it’s different because of a very specific reason, which, as Kristina Scott, director of Alabama Possible notes, is “the legacy of slavery.” Nonetheless, Benjamin Studebaker would have us believe that “We can talk about [the causes of Alabama’s white poverty] . . . without in any way reducing our concern for people of color both in the south and around the country.” Well, it seems to me that—given the sharply differentiated figures between white and black poverty—talking about white poverty in isolation—or even talking about poverty in general—is necessarily limiting one’s concern for meaningfully addressing black poverty. And this isn’t just in Alabama. In all but one of the nation’s top ten states with the highest poverty levels, black poverty rates are double—and in many cases almost triple—that of white poverty.

So rather than Benjamin Studebaker asking us to pause and reflect on the potential for injured white feelings when we process basic numbers and reasonably identify African-Americans as the source of the Moore defeat, he should ask himself how he’d feel if he was one of the 73% of Lowndes County residents whom a study by Baylor College of Medicine and Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise recently reported “had been exposed to raw sewage washing back into their homes as a result of faulty septic tanks or waste pipes becoming overwhelmed in torrential rains.” It would be hard to imagine Ben Studebaker not finding a different and perhaps more nuanced appreciation for the situation of black poverty if his own feces wasn’t rapidly and expeditiously shunted to a place far, far away from him via an efficient and well-functioning plumbing and sewage system. If it, instead, resurfaced just out in his front yard. Or if not him, then his family or his friends or his neighbors. Because that’s black life in Lowndes County, Alabama.

At the very least, he should spend some time worrying about how a lot of those poor white people who voted for Moore and Jones—those people who’ve also been “disadvantaged and exploited by our economic system”—have historically used the footholds afforded them by federal anti-poverty programs to get further the hell away from poorer black people. Maybe he should worry about how race-blind programs in an age of widespread black generational poverty as a result of slavery and Jim Crow and redlining and mass incarceration might promote and facilitate that behavior rather than solve it.

And that’s not me engaging in what Ben calls an “intellectually and politically lazy tendency to ridicule and bully white southerners.” That’s the fundamental reality of America’s class structure. Some of those Jones voters—and maybe even some of those Moore voters—might very well be decent and good-hearted and non-racist people. Maybe. But I guarantee that all of them who are poor don’t like the condition of poverty and don’t like being around people who are at the very bottom of the social order. And what that means here in America is that they don’t like being around the black people who’ve been relegated there for hundreds of years. And—goodheartedness be damned—the minute those white people can get as far away from black people and their proximity to the social bottom as their finances will allow, they will.

And this is where the political imagination of Leftists like Ben Studebaker—for all of their thorough and incisive analysis of the catastrophes wrought upon the poor—appears to seize up: at the critical point of triage. They name the disaster. They describe the tyranny of a system developed to further enrich those who control it. They readily apprehend the crisis and the urgency of intervention. But beyond that, the conceptual response becomes cautious and sober. And the overweening concern about the limits of electoral possibility—which tends to manifest in a need to dishonestly frame the crisis as something that hasn’t inflicted its damages within the working class in a massively uneven and racialized way—already begins to corrode a politics of meaningful justice.

By ignoring the differences between white poverty and black poverty, it preserves the basic racialization of the class structure, even as it proposes to be able to offer the only means to dismantle it. And by actively trying to focus the conversation away from black Alabaman voters, like those in Lowndes County who came out to carry Doug Jones to victory, what you’re effectively looking to do is deny them something they can now cash in, politically, to maybe get some specific assistance that might help actually narrow the poverty gap. Until that happens—until the poverty rates in America are actually brought more closely together to resemble one another—the enduring disparity of the economic situation between the races will fail to be solved by universal policy alone. At best, that sort of policy—without inbuilt reparations for African-American Descendants of Slaves—can provide only a transposition of the current social arrangement, in which an interval of inequality would still exist between the races, only at a slightly different pitch. Those of us in the Left who profess a genuine commitment to justice should be very critical of, and even indignant with, that arrangement, since as long as there is a bottom stratum of society made up of black people, the conditions for meaningful equality among this country’s citizens cannot rightly be in place.

There is a longstanding and baleful account of black life in America that Breaking Brown has spent virtually its entire existence trying to counterbalance and undo. One that attributes certain deficiencies in the black community—the blighted neighborhoods, the elevated rates of criminality; the supposed listlessness and miserable poverty of its members—to basic and immutable facts of those individuals’ personal habits and choices. One that maintains if only African-Americans simply made better decisions, they would be able to transcend their situation.

Breaking Brown proceeds from a fully developed critique of this expedient catch-all of black life in America. And like much of the worst prevailing anti-black ideology that the projectaims to deracinate from society at large, that crude synopsis has found many of its most ardent supporters within the black community itself. What Breaking Brown is attempting to demonstrate is that in fact these aspects of black life can no more be considered essential to the character of the people than a fever can be regarded as having developed independent of some deeper infection; that this febrile state of the black community is more appropriately viewed as epiphenomenal of a racialized capitalism that—with this latest tax reform—has now fully hit its stride in its ability to heap unmitigated punishment upon its victims. Breaking Brown has, in short, worked very hard to unburden African-American Descendants of Slaves of the lie that they themselves are largely responsible for their condition.

Of this harmful set of ideas, there has been perhaps no more prominent spokesperson and influential messenger than Barack Obama. In so many ways Obama emerges from exactly this primordial brine-sludge of anti-black beliefs, a fact which is nowhere else more apparent than in his delivering of the commencement speech to Morehouse College’s class of 2013, wherein he tells a lawn teeming with rain-soaked, African-American graduates seated on folding chairs that, in effect, it’s tough shit they are black in a country which, from its very inception, has been systematically and by design hostile to their people’s advancement.

Obama’s was a presidency which, from the first, was conceived more as a divine event, similar to the kind of thing that W.E.B. Du Bois—then writing in 1903 and reflecting back on what the promise of emancipation meant to black people—had said about how the enslaved envisioned their eventual freedom as that which would contain “the end of all doubt and disappointment.” And even as the hallowed figure of Obama evinced a patently hollow interest in—and at times cold contempt of—the community with which he claimed affinity, he continued to be regarded as the very fulfillment of salvation and progress which Du Bois had, a century earlier, described a putatively freed black society in desperate search of; and which, then like now, was made to elude them. And so if there’s one area in which Breaking Brown in fact does hold many African-Americans fully accountable for some of their continued disadvantage, it is in exactly this: their unflinching support of Barack Obama. A man who despite all his symbolism of the distance they’d come from the noose, was himself—because it was only ever symbolism to begin with and nothing more—an albatross worn willingly around the necks in the black community.

If there is any indication of the amount of work that Breaking Brown has cut out for itself with respect to elucidating the community on the dangerous longing for the country’s first African-American president, there is no more obvious example than the work of Ta-Nehisi Coates and its consistently earning a slot in the Top-Seller lists. Virtually every article or essay by Coates provides occasion to journey through the writer’s nakedly uncritical recollection of the Obama years, a modus operandi which—in response to the much more primitive and traditional form of white supremacy that’s been embraced by Obama’s successor—has become particularly pitched as of late. And, judging by the title of Coates’s latest book, We Were Eight Years in Power, the writer shows fully zero interest in transitioning from a body of work that is basically an ahistorical lament over one man, to a deeper engagement with certain realities that directly contradict the idea that the Obama presidency in some way constituted a period of social and economic advancement for black people in this country.

Breaking Brown‘s occupancy in this particular critical space is a necessary antidote to how Ta-Nehisi Coates and other members of the black intellectual class all appear singularly incapable of producing any critique of American racial politics that does not ultimately aim to absolve, or at the very least, excuse Barack Obama from his role in contributing to the eroding quality of black life in the United States and the insidious notion that, in order to overcome those circumstances, African-Americans themselves must only tap into the supposed virtue of self-reliance.

One need only consider the extremely mild and qualified and ‘well on the one hand’ censure by Coates of Obama’s Morehouse speech: “I would not suggest that it is in his power to singlehandedly repair history. But I would say that, in his role as American president, it is wrong for him to hand wave at history;” or, “Perhaps [African-Americans] cannot practically receive targeted policy. But surely they have earned something more than targeted scorn,” to the unequivocal and venerating language he uses in the very same article to articulate his personal feelings about the man himself: “I think the stature of the Obama family—the most visible black family in American history—is a great blow in the war against racism. I am filled with pride whenever I see them: There is simply no other way to say that. I think Barack Obama, specifically, is a remarkable human being—wise, self-aware, genuinely curious and patient. It takes a man of particular vision to know, as Obama did, that the country really was ready to send an African American to the White House.”

Of that same speech, Yvette Carnell had this to say, an excoriation which absolutely deserves to be quoted in full:

“I watched this man say something in front of black kids he would never say in front of white kids. He would never go into Stanford—into Harvard—and tell them what they don’t deserve and what they’re not entitled to, especially since what they’re going through is a systemic failure. When we look at all those numbers [of black poverty, incarceration rates, eviction], you don’t get numbers that big with an individual failure. Those numbers get to be that big because of a systemic failure. And Barack Obama wanted to be the black daddy of black men. That’s not your role. That was never his role. His role was political. You are the president of the United States. And what you did when you showed up to Morehouse is tell a lot of black men, who achieved beyond the odds to get a college education, you told them what the government wasn’t gonna do instead of what the government was gonna do to make sure that [they’re] treated fairly. What is the government gonna do to make sure that you can get a job as a Morehouse grad. We see that black people who go to school and get a degree don’t even have the same odds as a white person who didn’t get a degree. Instead of telling me, Mr. Obama, what you not gonna do, how about you tell me what you are gonna do so that we’re treated fairly by employers? Instead of telling me what you not gonna do or not gonna see in terms of excuses, why don’t you commend me for how I got here against the odds to be standing here in the rain at a college. Why don’t you do that? Know why he can’t do that? Because he’s not anchored in our history.”

Breaking Brown exhibits no such fragility or sensitivity to emotion in negotiating the enduring legacy of Barack Obama. Moreover, it heard clear and pure the plaintive echoing of the cry for progress described by Du Bois having rung persistently up to, and throughout, these last eight years. It is the emotional connection to Obama, Breaking Brown argues, that mutes and warps that imperative. And the project understands the severance of that connection is necessary for realistic and purposeful reckoning to occur if the African-American community is ever to move beyond contentment with symbols of progress and attain meaningful, material improvement. For this, Yvette Carnell is often accused of being depressing. But maybe if there’s one thing that all these hot takes of the Obama years penned by writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates need more than anything right away, it’s a wet blanket of truth.

There’s this thing about how white players in the NBA are statistically superior from the free throw line than black players. They actually studied this, like in the mid or late 60s. Whether or not this is the case today is kind of anyone’s guess. For very obvious reasons there’s not a lot of purely race-based statistical analysis happening in professional sports nowadays. But anyway they controlled for height and everything, and it turned out to be something like white players were 4% more accurate than black players at the free throw line, which—statistically—is not insignificant. They then went and tested the same thing at the college level. This time they even passed around a questionnaire that players were asked to fill out because the researchers wanted to get so fine-grained with their analysis that they could potentially look at the players’ free throw percentages for the season and correlate them with like an absent father or the family’s annual gross income or whatever. They analyzed the free throw data, then re-analyzed it to control for height, and what they found was that the data bore out basically in exactly the same manner as it had in the pros, with the white players again being reliably more accurate from the foul line than black players. The questionnaire also plainly ruled out the differences being accounted for by certain variables like socio-economic status or like a dad not being around while the kid was growing up to make him stay out ’til after dark doing free-throw drills in the driveway either. So what was it?

The basic hypothesis was that—in sports that were more reactive in nature (boxing, football, etc.)—black players outperformed whites, while white players tended to—in sports that were more self-paced (golf; bowling)—outperform blacks. And in order to eliminate certain social factors that exclude black participants (e.g. golf is expensive; professional bowling is not exactly a sport in which black role models abound), they looked exclusively to a sport like basketball which contained both reactive and self-paced components, and in which African-Americans are overrepresented. The results of the free throw experiment, taken together with black players statistically outperforming white players in the reactive aspects of the game (field goal shots; one-on-one play), appeared to support the researchers’ original hypothesis that performance in the two styles of sports could be charted out along lines of race and could be, they said, “genetic in origin.”

It wasn’t until a few years later that a guy named James M. Jones came along and appended a more nuanced explanation onto the original hypothesis of reactive vs. self-paced performance disparities. Those low free throw percentages, he argued, couldn’t really be properly understood outside of “the cultural context in which basketball skills develop.” In other words, it wasn’t that—with respect to self-paced sports—black players were less capable merely because of their biology; it was that certain “culturally conditioned attributes and capacities” of an African-American’s unique psychology weren’t exercised in those sports, and thus accounted for the performance disparity.

Jones’s overall aim was much more ambitious than to simply rescue the African-American free throw shooter or professional bowler from the fate of a purely essentialist understanding of the number of bricks or gutter balls that might issue from their hands. Nor was he really all that interested in limiting his analysis to the world of sports. Rather, Jones set out to argue that African-American culture on the whole—in particular its powerful and robust psychological element; the “patterns of thinking, feeling, behaving, and valuing”—reflected and was “continuous with its African origins,” and was instrumental in helping cope, adapt, and essentially survive the contexts of slavery and dehumanization into which they’d been forced, and the oppressed condition in which they today remain.

What Jones was hoping to underscore was that this conception of African-American culture markedly “diverge[s] from one constructed on the principles of a European-derived materialistic individualism.” Instead, it’s one whose nature “reflect[s] the core African ethos,” which—to the extent that it departs from a Western ideal of self-reliance—can reasonably be understood as being grounded in communitarian values. Abdou Diouf—who was Senegal’s prime minister around the time when Jones was writing—perhaps articulates that ethos more precisely: “The emotional characteristics of the Negro-African form the substructure of communal life in Africa . . . it develops especially the inclination to solidarity, mutual aid, justice and honour, and by stimulating the collective work and equity in the distribution, they forge the socialistic and civil spirits which inspire our strategy of development.” With this notion informing his analysis of African-American culture, Jones would go on to argue that—beyond mechanisms for survival in their oppression—these “expressions of psyche” that are rooted in Africa take on a unique and significant political valence here in America in the context of the ongoing struggle for equality: “Progress in rights and opportunities, however much qualified,” he says, “opens up new avenues of possibility and expands the range of goals to which the reactionary and evolutionary mechanisms may be directed.”

Just prior to Breaking Brown‘s indefinite hiatus, Yvette Carnell uploaded a short video to her YouTube channel that, in many ways, echoed the words of both Abdou Diouf and James M. Jones. And, as she prepared to regroup with the Breaking Brown project, she left her audience to deliberate over this thought in the meantime:

“I don’t know if African-Americans, morally . . . not intellectually . . . morally—in terms of our values—have what it takes to be super-capitalists. I don’t know if we have what it takes to be capitalists. The problem is African-Americans don’t have the level of viciousness required to snatch or take anything on that level. The way we that we have gotten ahead . . . and not even ahead . . . but the way that we’ve gotten to be still alive after what we’ve been through . . . the way that we have secured ourselves after what we’ve been through is by collectively doing with and for each other.”

Some of the reaction to Yvette’s statement was predictably swift and defensive. The capitalist economy, they contended, is in fact an eminently tenable system for uplift in the black community; this despite the fact that the very system for which they are advocating has already basically completely devoured their community and is now merely using what’s left of it to pick its teeth as it moves onto its second course: the white middle-class. There was also the weird and wince-inducing insistence by some commenters that, in fact, African-Americans do, as a collective,possess all the requisite immorality and viciousness needed to economically thrive in a hyper-capitalist society; the moment to do so, they said, has just not yet arrived. Why someone would rush to claim ownership of such innate depravity is maybe best understood as, simply, behavior conditioned by sheer desperation for some kind of solution in the face of abject ruin, or how capitalism has come to so totally subsume the political imaginations of its subjects that even those who are its chief victims foreclose on the possibility of any alternative arrangement between human beings outside of the purely exploitative. For it’s a bleak situation indeed when a person would sooner repudiate the suggestion of her innate good than flatly condemn the wretchedness of capitalism with which that righteousness is said to be incommensurate.

However, not one of the skeptics of the idea of African-American collectivist cultural norms saw fit to refute—or to even challenge—the validity of Yvette Carnell’s claim on the grounds of actual science. After all, how can someone who is not, as far as we know, particularly verse in modern cultural neuroscience make such a seemingly broad and confident assertion as to the morality and values system of a particular race of people? Isn’t this precisely the sort of essentialist way of looking at groups of people that leads even so-called experts to say something like black basketball players miss a higher percentage of free throws because they’re black? And insofar as the sorts of gains that Breaking Brown is attempting to help realize for African-American Descendants of Slaves, which undoubtedly require a collectivist-minded constituency, it’s worth considering—or at least being skeptical about—how the project may lean too heavily on its ideal rather than grapple with the question of exactly how much the people it needs to act collectively in order to make those gains actually do favor the community over the individual.

The answer to that question, like with so many things in America—as Ms. Carnell herself often says—appears to be quite complicated. In a wide-ranging, 2002 meta-analysis of studies looking at individualism and collectivism across certain ethnicities within the U.S., African-Americans emerged as more individualistic than their white counterparts. About a decade later, another empirically relevant piece of data for the cultural propensity to collectivism surfaced: the frequency of the S allele in the serotonin transmitter gene 5-HTTLRP. Lower frequencies of that S allele were reported in African-Americans, which would in turn support the earlier studies’ findings of African-Americans having a psychological orientation toward an individualist, and not collectivist, culture.

However, in that same meta-analysis, researchers performed a regional analysis in which Africa (particularly West Africa, the region from which the majority of slaves were stolen and brought to the U.S.) was demonstrated to greatly exceed every other global region that was examined for psychological traits of collectivism. In particular, Africa’s collectivist rating was nearly double that of Western Europe, and 13x’s higher than English-speaking regions. Moreover, the data on African-Americans includes two major caveats: a relatively small sample size of African-Americans, owing in part to the difficulty in recruiting them for genetic research. And, the second caveat—less explicitly stated as such in the study, though arguably of far greater significance—is the fine distinction that necessarily needs to be drawn in considering the ramifications of living as an African-American in an oppressive, materialist, and largely anti-black society for centuries, and what that sustained experience will do to a human psyche. James Jones argues as much when he says, in “the hostile context [of America] . . . [i]ndividualism in the service of survival and establishing self-worth may be of a different quality than individualism that serves personal achievement.”

In other words, for African-Americans, one side of that hyphen—culturally—is doing a lot more work in (re)shaping the psyche than the other. It is that culture within which circulates all the wealth and everything else that would materially benefit the African-American community, and in which it has historically been hoarded in order to preclude the possibility that descendants of slaves may heal and be made whole. Breaking Brown aims to show that if there is any hope at all for African-Americans to lay claim to what of that bounty is rightfully theirs, it is the other side of that hyphen—that side in which those collectivistattitudes of mind find their historical roots—that must be recovered from the cultish delirium of individualism and tapped into for the political project here at home. That political project, at least at this present stage, is not particularly interested in prescribing one specific ideology over the other as a definitive way forward for African-American Descendants of Slaves, but rather is interested in asking those who desire change—especially now as the nation enters a new period of what Antonio Moore rightly describes as an amplified and omnidirectional assault on black life—to weigh the suitability of those traditional values with respect to a politics of individualism, a politics that has exploited them and given them the only thing they’ve arguably ever collectively known here: a social and economic environment of oppression.

Over a century ago today, an African-American reverend named Alexander Crummell stood before a congregation in Saint Mary’s Chapel in Washington D.C. and preached the following words in his Thanksgiving Day sermon:

I see nought in the future but that we shall be scattered like chaff before the wind before the organized labor of the land, the great power of capital, and the tremendous tide of emigration, unless, as a people, we fall back upon the might and mastery which come from the combination of forces and the principle of industrial co-operation. Most of your political agitation is but wind and vanity. What this race needs in this country is power — the forces that may be felt. And that comes from character, and character is the product of religion, intelligence, virtue, family order, superiority, wealth, and the show of industrial forces. These are forces which we do not possess. We are the only class which, as a class, in this country, is wanting in these grand elements. The very first effort of the colored people should be to lay hold to them; and they will take such root in this American soil that only the convulsive upheaving of the judgement-day can throw them out.

Religion, intelligence, family order and wealth. It is these qualities which Crummell argues comprise and determine the character of a people. Or, put another way: the church, school, family and business. And what may at first glance seem like the sort of self-empowerment rhetoric of character so often used while dangling the country’s meritocratic fallacy, carrot-like, before the noses of those people who’ve been made prodigiously handicapped, what in fact those collective structures are capable of doing is shaping behavior and enabling an expansion of individual action to help effect outcomes for the community. The collective structures of which Crummell speaks are, simply, institutions. And by his configuration of power, then, it is through the institutions of a people that power must be pursued.

Anyone who has stayed abreast of some of the moves that Breaking Brown has made over the past couple months while it has been on hiatus is aware that—while the content of the show has ebbed—host Yvette Carnell has been anything but idle with respect to her efforts in pushing ahead with the show’s central mission of helping to secure racial justice for African-American descendants of slaves. Moreover, it appears that what is informing the next step of the Breaking Brown project is precisely a conviction in the institutions of the black community as being a powerful and influential vehicle for advancing their interests on a larger scale.

In September of this year, Yvette Carnell gave a speech at the Angela Project conference, the primary objective of which is to revitalize an historic element of activism in the black church, and press that into service of obtaining reparative justice. In that speech, she deftly makes the case for the particular justice claim that African-American descendants of slaves have as citizens of this country, why that claim must be pursued relentlessly if there is to be any hope of meaningful uplift for them as a people, and the clarion call that the black church must heed in lending their institutional weight to the cause of helping their community get what is owed them and on the road to healing.

This pivot by Breaking Brown to engage a major institutional channel committed to vaulting the issue of reparations is an astute, potent, and very strategic move. It’s a move that accords with Breaking Brown having long cautioned the black community of involving themselves in what can amount to a political side-project; namely, toiling in trying to tease out some of the stitched-in racism of certain white institutions instead of applying themselves collectively to strengthen and prevail upon those institutions whose sole reason is to provide and advocate for them to do just that.

In the aftermath of the black community having been consigned to instability as a result of the white institution of slavery, it is arguably the detachment of certain black institutions that has played a role in facilitating their languishing in that condition. And so the cause of reparative justice is no doubt greatly amplified and advanced with the informed involvement of those institutions. However, as Dr. Kevin Cosby and Antonio Moore discuss on the latter’s recent podcast episode, “If Middle Black Family Hits Zero Wealth, Does It End The Black Church?”, the ability for black people to be made whole is intimately bound up with the question of the black church’s ability to itself weather and survive the diminishing economic status of African-Americans, which if it continues apace, threatens to completely tank in a mere three and a half decades.

These two struggles are indeed very much interconnected, and for the church to meaningfully re-engage politically, and advocate on behalf of its community, requires as a pre-condition the community itself being prepared to re-engage politically. That Breaking Brown has spent several years now laying a foundation for this political re-engagement in the black community to take place again attests to the breadth of vision and political acumen of Yvette Carnell as she now prepares to couple the project with what, as Dr. Cosby himself contends—if the institution of the black church is true to its historic mission—is “urban America’s last hope.”

One of the most irksome and often uttered refrains from so-called fans of Breaking Brown‘s Yvette Carnell is the shallow retort “Well, then what’s your solution?” or “So what’s your alternative?” Often, more than with any real openness to actual discussion or dialogue, these questions are posed combatively and dismissively.

Notwithstanding how idealistic and naïve the expectation is that there would even be, in the first place, an easily articulable, programmatic response to the myriad positions of disadvantage that descendants of slaves have been made to occupy in this country for centuries, the refusal to understand Breaking Brown as a solution in and of itself in fact signals a profoundly deeper and troubling predicament for the show. Namely, contending with the somewhat paradoxical situation of black people who, on one hand, clearly desire a dramatic change in the social order, but who, on the other, balk at, and regard as unproductive, the absolutely critical, indispensable and foundational work that is needed to begin effecting that restructuring: the formation of a new political consciousness.

How has such a rigid and obstinate mentality taken root within the group most disadvantaged by the present political-economic arrangement? It is no doubt a testament to the sheer efficiency and craftsmanship of our ideological production industry. And to borrow from the vernacular of capitalism—the economic system for which that industry is principally tasked with producing appropriate subjects—the process is now more or less automated.

Here’s a shitty, obvious fact of reality: Capitalism has always required a highly unequal social order. Historically, it’s been a lot messier preserving that. From the very hands-on beginnings of stealing black people from Africa and shackling them in chains to compel their free labor, to Jim Crow and the slightly more remotely-operated and “sophisticated” engineering of black disadvantage via redlining, the elites have consistently had to intercede and tweak the system as black people fought for and won modest, incremental gains toward some access to stability. And although policy now has a sheen of being not explicitly discriminatory, each permutation of the social order since the plantation has proved over and over again one very salient thing: an essential feature of the social order is a permanent underclass. There must be people at the very bottom of society for capitalism to maximally function.

And so with the fact of policy having evolved to where it is superficially sensitive to the fact that they can’t be so nakedly racist in their aim of maintaining a permanent underclass, those at the top faced a predicament. The question became, for them, how to effect that outcome despite that?

The answer is breathtaking in its simplicity: Encourage black people to now participate in contemporary American life.

What’s so insidious about this is that the realities of black life following the legacy of slavery, and decade after decade of anti-black practices, make descendants of slaves incomparably vulnerable to the most refined and deceptively ruthless systems of exploitation the capitalist machine has ever contained. Those at the top have merely opened up the playing field to an America that, in its present form, requires all sorts of instruments of entrapment—loans and credit— for everyone to participate in it, let alone succeed. And to extend those instruments to a people who’ve been systematically locked out of securing the basic stability needed to offset just some of the risk associated with borrowing, and to invite them to take part in the American Dream™, is to sit back and watch the return on the initial investment of slavery positively flourish.

From chains to so-called “choice,” the history of black people in the United States can be described as having had a legacy of ultimate disadvantage created for them, and then, later, after the conditions of that legacy had set, marketing the pernicious ideology to them that they alone can transcend it by mere individual volition. To be more exact, it’s not enough to tell them that they can transcend it, they must be compelled to believe they have no other choice but to try. And so that mentality—conditioned by capitalism and brought to bear on choices like whether or not to buy a home, go to college, or pursue success at the individual level, be it in the form of celebrity or even just careers that necessitate a greater degree of stability than black people have been permitted to attain—that mentality then becomes itself a mainstay in the mass (re)production of the instability and disadvantage of the underclass.

This is what makes what Breaking Brown is doing so urgent and essential. When you’ve designed a system so total that the people whom it has relegated to the very bottom of the social order are resigned to advocating as the only solution to their misery the very ideology that has ensured it, you have achieved a feat of social engineering that is virtually flawless. And by educating her audience on how those at the top have, in effect, now set up a mock auction of the American Dream™ primarily for and by which to further disadvantage the descendants of those who—beyond being forcibly denied the dream—were bought and sold at slave auction to build and make the dream possible for their traders and their descendants, Yvette Carnell is looking to stage an intervention at the very point of ideological production. That this would not be conceived as—not just a solution—but a fundamental solution, only reaffirms the difficulty and the absolute necessity of the task ahead for the show.

Yvette Carnell is not an oracle. She is the host of a black political news-media channel on YouTube. And so to the extent that fans of Breaking Brown want to know the specifics on how the new social order will be brought about, it’s worth taking a minute to think about the role and impact of traditional, mainstream news-media, one that has led many black people—even those who are sympathetic to the project of building a more just and equal social order—to reject or doubt the practicality of the sort of political consciousness that would help bring that vision of society closer toward its realization. No doubt the select stories of certain black individuals paraded out by traditional mainstream news-media are powerful and seductive illusions about the possibilities of black life in modern-day America. Capitalism requires a narrative of attainable success to help ensure its underclass will keep striving, and traditional media has promoted the lie with the zeal characteristic of a charlatan who preys on the unfortunate.

It’s the ideology in that sub-narrative of black stability in the 21st Century, hawked to a community rendered desperate by system after system of exploitation since they were first brought to this country that Breaking Brown is out to expose. And in so doing, disabuse the audience of the notion that—outside of organizing for a change in the political arrangement—there is simply no meaningful, capital-S Solution available to the black community for a way out of the abject condition into which they were put and under which they continue to languish. This is, critically, what Breaking Brown understands, and what it is setting out to do by shaping a political consciousness among African-American descendants of slaves that is informed first and foremost by their history and its enduring, persistent influence in their present-day reality. Because, as that history has shown, in the absence of that well-educated, politically-engaged and organized, collectivist-minded community, what is an absolute certainty is that the assembly line of Black Disadvantage ™ will continue unimpeded.